Guilt among husband caregivers of Chinese women with breast cancer: The roles of male gender-role norm, caregiving burden and coping processes

Abstract

Caregiver guilt (i.e., feeling of inadequacy in providing care to patients) is commonly experienced and studied among husbands of breast cancer survivors in Western countries. However, little is known about the psychosocial correlates of caregiver guilt in their Chinese counterparts. A total of 176 husbands of Chinese breast cancer survivors completed a cross-sectional survey in Weifang, Shandong province, China. As expected, hierarchical regression results showed that higher caregiving burden was associated with higher levels of caregiver guilt. However, for those who had stronger endorsement of the "Masculinity strength" gender-role norm, higher seeking social support from spouse was associated with higher guilt; for those with higher levels of marital satisfaction, higher protective buffering (i.e., hiding of concerns and negative emotions to protect others) was associated with lower caregiver guilt. Western assumptions on the harm of protective buffering and the benefits of support seeking as well as related supportive evidence among Western populations do not directly apply to the Chinese culture, which should be brought awareness to research and practice. Practitioners should consider the cultural background of the caregivers and should not simply encourage support seeking and discourage protective buffering.

Caregiving motivations and experiences among family caregivers of patients living with advanced breast cancer in Ghana

“…Participants described that caregiving was entrenched in the Ghanaian cultural values; hence, the decision to care was viewed as an automatic obligation. This finding supports earlier evidence that describes caregiving as a communal family activity that is shaped by cultural norms [19]. Further, from our study, there were gender prescriptions in which females, specifically mothers and older daughters, were supposed to assume the caring role.…”

“…Additionally, our findings indicated that there were marital obligations in which male spouses were the main primary caregivers. This evidence was further confirmed in Yeung et al's [19] quantitative study of male spouses who cited that marital obligation may influence the decision to accept the role of caregiving for women living with advanced breast cancer. Also, our finding that caregiving was based on reciprocity supports previous research which showed that caregiving can be viewed as a form of repaying of good deeds formerly obtained from patients [48].…”

“…Prior research has highlighted that factors such as social norms and cultural values may influence caregivers' choices to accept the caregiving role [17][18][19][20][21]. For instance, a study by Ng et al among caregivers in Singapore found that familial commitments were reasons why PLOS ONE caregivers assumed the caregiving role for breast cancer patients [21].…”

The experiences of family caregivers living with breast cancer patients in low-and middle-income countries: a systematic review

“…Following the full-text screening, 107 were excluded because they did not meet the inclusion criteria as detailed in the PRISMA flow diagram. At the end of the screening procedure, 19 peer-reviewed citations remained for final inclusion in the review [3,4,6,10,15,[17][18][19][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33].…”

“…The majority of the included studies (n = 15) used quantitative approaches [3,10,15,18,19,[23][24][25][26][27][28][30][31][32][33] and the remaining (n = 4) were qualitative studies [4,6,17,29]. Studies were conducted in the following countries: Nigeria (n = 2), Malaysia (n = 3), Ghana (n = 1), China (n = 3), Iran (n = 6), Turkey (n = 1), Mexico (n = 1), Indonesia (n = 1), and India (n = 1).…”